The invention pertains to harvesting machines and more particularly to the rotary cutting heads associated with feed rollers which receive various forage materials as cut from a field and usually consolidated before feeding a stream of said material to the cutterhead which chops it into fine particles and passes the chopped produce to a blower which sends it to a wagon or into a vertical fill pipe adjacent a silo or the like.
One very popular type of rotary cutting head presently in use is that shown in prior U.S. Pat. No. 3,873,038 to Wagstaff dated Mar. 25, 1975, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,713,471 to Sadler dated Jan. 30, 1973, which have a plurality of cutting or chopping blades extending between parallel disc-type support members spaced axially along a shaft and fixed thereto for rotation therewith, said blades being spaced from each other around the peripheries of said support members. This results in the interior of said cutterhead being quite open and susceptible to chopped material passing into the interior of said head and rotating around therewith, as carryover, a certain amount before being thrown therefrom by other incoming material, or until it is accelerated to a sufficient speed to cause it to move to the periphery due to centrifugal force. In either instance chopping efficiency is diminished appreciably. The problem does not exist to any substantial extent in cylindrical type cutterheads as in U.S. Pat. No. 4,061,284, to Raisbeck et al, dated Dec. 6, 1977, in which a cylindrical tube has brackets welded thereto in a certain pattern.
Still another U.S. Pat. No. 3,876,159 to Kidd, dated Apr. 8, 1975, shows a cutterhead which is of the open interior type but employs so-called J-shaped blades, which are more costly than simple blades made from substantially flat stock. In a blade of this nature the tail is substantially different in location and attitude then knife and baffle arrangement of the present invention.
Due to the fact that many harvesters are in existence which have the so-called open type cutterheads, especially of the type shown in said Wagstaff and Sadler patents, but which are inefficient because of the occurrence of carryover of chopped material therein, it is one of the principal objectives of the present invention to improve the efficiency thereof by the addition of baffle members to the existing blades and this can be accomplished with relative ease and small expense without undertaking any extensive revision of said heads, by adapting the present invention thereto.